Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> Xiphos shows "Hebrew" in hebrew alphabets etc. My opinion is very
> strong here: it's wrong. All names should be in English for English
> speakers, in French for French speakers etc. The above mentioned
> examples should of course be in the same language the user
> understands. It should be possible to add > another field to the
> canonical list in the native language so that any frontend could show
> the native language name in parenthesis or in a tooltip or whatever.
> The canonical list should be in English anyways because English is
> the default language for any i18n'ed computer application.
This (xiphos current approach) is one possible approach. The other is to
present the localised names for each language - German: Deutsch,
Englisch, Latein, Finnisch, Persisch - English: German, English, Latin,
Finnish, Farsi - Farsi: المانی، انگلیسی، رومیای، فینلاندی، فارسی
You favour the latter, we at Xiphos the former. Yours will require a lot
of hard work to translate those names unless we can find some
authorative sources and import them + possibly also create a lot of bulk.
I am not sure were can call either approach really "wrong" - they are
different and have different advantages.
The main problem with Xiphos approach is as Chris rightly states with
languages which are so dead and extinct that no one would even recognise
their names in the language.
The main problem with your approach is that many languages are not even
named in some of the languages we have interfaces now. When I translated
BibleDesktop into Farsi (which uses your suggested approach) I found
that I came rapidly to the end of my (extensive) dictionaries and was
left clueless what to do next. Transliterating the names seemed wrong,
leaving them in English when everything else is translated seemed wrong
too.
Peter